Thursday, March 19, 2009

Senator Chris Dodd: Incompetent Criminal or Criminally Incompetent?

I am not just being rhetorical or cute with that headline. Since January, 2007 Senator Dodd has been Chairman of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs. Prior to that he was the ranking minority member. He is the regulators regulator, this massive fraud happened on his watch. See our post from last year, below.

Following up on "Will Obama, McCain, Dodd Return Contributions From AIG Employees?"comes this, from ZeroHedge:
Chris Dodd has taken Zero Hedge's advice and has decided to refund his campaign contributions from not only criminals with a record, and destroyers of the free market such as Joe Cassano but everyone else at AIG. Seems the Connecticut Democrat had received over $100,000 from a dozen AIG workers, which include Douglas Poling, of Fairfield; Christopher Phole, of New Canaan; Steven Pike, of Stamford; Robert Powell, of Westport; Joseph Rooney, of Fairfield; Gregory Ruffa, of Darien; Christian Toft, of Weston; Steven Wagar, of Norwalk; Jonathan Liebergall, of New Canaan; Leonid Shekhtman, of Redding; and James Haas, of Fairfield. Three of these executives, Poling, Haas and Liebergall, were outed as possible recipients of bonuses on Wednesday. The Connecticut post missed Joe Cassano, maybe because his CT house is only his second residence.

However this may be the least of Dodd's transgressions. Yesterday the uber-conflicted Democrat for the first time openly talked about his role in determining AIG's bonuses (of course, not at all influenced by campaign donations).
Sen. Chris Dodd for the first time Wednesday acknowledged he was instrumental in creating legislation that cleared the way for disgraced executives at taxpayer-rescued AIG to walk away with hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses.
Dodd will have a lot of explaining to do to the one or two voters he may still have left.
This is not the first time Dodd has found himself in this position of pillorying a corporate villain in one breath and in the next defending himself from claims he's too cozy with the same miscreant....MORE
*Yesterday we saw that the Senator was the number one recipient of AIG's largesse. Last year, in "Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Social Purpose and Bribes (FNM; FRE)" we saw the top recipients of Fannie Mae's loot:

...Top Recipients of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac Campaign Contributions, 1989-2008

1. Dodd, Christopher J, D-CT
2. Kerry, John, D-MA
3. Obama, Barack, D-IL
4. Clinton, Hillary, D-NY

Source.

It is starting to look like this guy is bought and paid for by the same people who dumped this flaming bag of shit on America's doorstep, costing us Trillions and sticking us with a bill that won't be paid off for three generations.